To continue in one path is to go backward.
IGOR STRAVINSKYMusic must be listened to; it is not enough to hear it. A duck hears also.
More Igor Stravinsky Quotes
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I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Composition is selective improvisation.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
The performance has developed to such an extent in recent years that it challenges the music itself and will soon threaten it with relegation.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
I had another dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting by Goya.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Good composers don’t borrow, they steal.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
A cultural snob is someone who claims to be familiar with the incomprehensible.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
All you have to do is close your eyes and wait for the symbols.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Old age is a time of humiliations, the most disagreeable of which, for me, is that I cannot work long at sustained high pressure with no leaks in concentration.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Music’s exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
The principle of the endless melody is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ending.
IGOR STRAVINSKY